Anxious identification in ‘The Sopranos’ and sport: psychoanalytic and queer theories of embodiment

Abstract

The article uses an episode from the television series ‘The Sopranos’ to illustrate how embodied experiences of sporting practices such as high-school football involve both conscious and unconscious dynamics. It outlines how cultural practices such as masculinist sport are psychically incorporated into the body through the process of identification. The article uses Freud's concept of identification to explain how fantasy and representation are involved in the formation of embodied subjectivity. Contemporary queer theories about identification provide insights into how psychic dynamics both reinforce and undermine the illusory cultural promise of heteronormative whiteness offered by high-school sport and physical education.

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